Towards Practical Automated Trust Negotiation

Authors:William H. Winsborough and Ninghui Li

Abstract:

Exchange of attribute credentials is a means to establish mutual trust
between strangers that wish to share resources or conduct business
transactions. Automated Trust Negotiation (ATN) is an approach to
regulate the exchange of sensitive credentials by using access control
policies. Existing ATN work makes unrealistic simplifying assumptions
about credential-representation languages and credential storage.
Moreover, while existing work protects the transmission of credentials,
it fails to hide the contents of credentials, thus providing
uncontrolled access to potentially sensitive attributes. To protect
information about sensitive attributes, we introduce the notion of
attribute acknowledgment policies (Ack policies). We then introduce
the trust target graph (TTG) protocol, which supports a more realistic
credential language, Ack policies, and distributed storage of
credentials.

Reference:In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Policies for
Distributed Systems and Networks, pages 92--103. IEEE Computer
Society Press, June 2002.